


Trust me, I have a plan

by cerebel



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Drug Addiction, F/M, Italian Mafia, Non-Sexual Bondage, alternate beginning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:59:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerebel/pseuds/cerebel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternate Universe. Mob doctor Joan is told to detox a debt-ridden addict named Sherlock Holmes. It goes poorly. For the mob, that is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trust me, I have a plan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [allthingsholy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthingsholy/gifts).



First, the headache somewhere back and within from his temples, throbbing at odds with the harsh, hollow water-drip echoing in his ears. The smell of mildew, and a certain numbness in the posterior region. Smooth material under his fingertips, fight constriction around his wrists, wrenched up and back. 

He opens his eyes, and immediately closes them again. Blinding white light. Very well. 

Bathroom, he concludes. Specifically, the bathtub. Specifically, a bathtub with what feels rather like a cold, metallic tube -- ah, a handicap assistance bar -- bolted into the wall, where the cuffs around his wrists have kindly and securely been strung. He takes a moment to catalogue the other smells: the choking cleanliness of a plain Dove bar, a floral scent that he pegs as lavender -- conditioner, likely -- and a hint of savory. Chicken broth? The sound of traffic, or the sound of the ocean... no, certainly traffic, which means he’s still in the city.

In which city, however, is the question.

He cracks his eyes open, tentatively, and this time endures the lances, spears, daggers et cetera that find their way into his optic nerve. 

The white is sunlight, no doubt about it. Midafternoon, if he isn’t mistaken, two or three PM depending on longitude. The bathroom itself is old tile, re-grouted twice in the last five years, but no one bothered to replace the antique freestanding bathtub. Just drilled that metal bar into the wall, at a convenient angle but rather inconvenient location for anyone with a wheelchair. Perhaps an elderly person? A sick person? 

He tests the give of the bar. Not simply drilled into plaster; this was put here very specifically, anchored into the material of the wall. 

Building construction in the late 1950s, he estimates, renovated several times by either a shortcut-happy building crew or a stingy landlord. 

He cranes his neck up. The Dove bar is on the sink, he sees, and there is a folded tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush set aside in a neat rack. Along the wall, a toilet scrub brush and a few bottles of cleaners, set out at convenience. The windowsill is dusty, but the toilet is -- ah, yes, freshly clean. 

And given his own state...

Possibly freshly clean because it recently came into contact with copious amounts of bile. 

He smells old sweat on himself, and doesn’t recognize the clothing he’s in. Sweatpants, no underwear, old t-shirt broadcasting I ♥ NY, the sort that can be found at any souvenir store, stand, or mart across the city. It does indicate he’s still in Manhattan, which is better than nothing. A twist of his mouth reveals that there’s some tacky substance at the left corner. 

Footsteps approach. Light, female?, athletic?, moving without fear of being heard. He makes a quick calculation, and lets his head loll to the side, resuming the unconscious position that has given his neck such a vicious crick. 

The footsteps pause in the room adjacent. Sherlock considers, briefly, subtly shifting his position into something a bit more comfortable, so as to fake unconsciousness longer. The body can only take so much stress, after all, and he already feels both uncomfortably warm, feverish, and uncomfortably cold, a sure recipe for shivers. 

In a moment, he’s glad he didn’t, as the door opens without further warning, casting a shadow from the sunlit window onto his face.

“I know you’re awake.”

Voice is female, American, which doesn’t tell Sherlock so very much. He stays still, his mouth drooped open. He’s beginning to drool. How distasteful.

“Seriously.” A thunk against the bathtub, and Sherlock jumps, startles violently. He must be more on edge than he’d thought. Funny. It’s probably the kidnapping and restraints, actually. 

He scowls, and comes to face his captor, jailkeeper, whoever she is. Seems she’s Asiatic in descent, beautiful, slim, and wearing latex gloves like she was born to it. Stethoscope in one of her hands. Doctor or nurse or home caretaker -- doctor is what he thinks, considering the intelligence he sees in her eyes.

She offers him a glass of water. “Drink.” _Glass_ , real glass, which isn’t so very cautious of her at all. 

He reaches for it --

Comes up short. His hands won’t reach.

Ah. She’s not offering. She’s about to pour it into his mouth. Wonderful, because he’s just realized he’s ravenously thirsty. And that makes her lack of caution make a bit more sense. He can hardly smash a glass and attack her if he can’t move his hands more than six inches away from the bar. 

He tips his head back and lets the glass settle between parted lips. It isn’t such a stretch to be docile at the moment. He feels a bit like he’s been run over six or seven times by a large glass of absinthe driving a Mercedes. 

One, two, three swallows, and she pulls the glass away.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Like a three-day-dead possum,” he tells her. “With guts all out on the road.” His voice rasps. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me where I am.”

“Only if you tell me what you were on.” She rattles out a couple of Tylenol from a CVS bottle. He lets her drop them on his tongue, and waits until she provides more water before he swallows. 

“How about your name?” he counters.

“How about how much you owe them?” 

Ah, he’d thought this was mob-related. Quickly, he calculates: last time he checked, it was a few hundred thousand. He turns it back on her: “How about how you lost your medical license?” 

She flinches. Grits her teeth. It’s actually a remarkably subtle reaction, but he knows he’s hit home. He likes her already. 

“We’re not talking about me,” she tells him. 

“Certainly,” he says, aiming for ‘affable’ and hitting somewhere closer to ‘dying of the plague,’ or, perhaps, ‘croaking like a bullfrog.’ 

“So,” she says, pointedly. “What were you on?” 

“Heroin,” he tells her. “Nothing else, as far as I’m aware, though there’s always the possibility.” 

She nods. “I don’t have anything to make the comedown easier,” she says. “Besides water and aspirin.” 

“ _He_ didn’t bother to supply you?” 

“No. _He_ didn’t. Do you think you could keep down some soup?” 

“I think that every moment soup spends inside me, it will impart a given amount of nourishment,” he says, “not negated by the possibility of it returning later.” 

“You could have just said ‘yes’.” 

“My answer wasn’t yes.” 

She rolls her eyes. He likes her even better. “Are you going to feed me by hand?” he asks.

“Yes.” The shortness of the response just _dares_ him to say something about it. 

Not one to disappoint, he follows up. “Do you do this for all of your junkie captives?”

“Tell me if you start to feel sick.” 

“After I inform you, shall I puke all over the tub?” 

“I can wash it out if you do. But, no -- the bar’s positioned so you should be able to make it to the toilet.” 

She’s done this before, he realizes. Not just detoxing junkies, though he expects she’s experienced at that, as well. No, she’s kept someone prisoner here before. Perhaps this is even a regular occurrence. He cranes his head back, tilts it to get a good angle at the bar -- yes, there’s a pattern of wear. Many men, many handcuffs.

As she returns with the bowl, he decides to pursue a line of questioning that isn’t true in the least. “So,” he says, “how many people have you murdered in this bathtub?” 

“I haven’t murdered _anyone_.”

Uh-oh, this comes with a flash of guilt. Guilt at what she doesn’t make herself see, or has he actually hit upon some truth? 

“You plan to just let me go?” he asks, doubtfully.

“Open up.” 

And then she’s spooning broth into his mouth, and it’s very hard to talk around a mouthful of spoon, even more so when the broth is just a hint too hot. This precludes real conversation. By the time she’s done, he’s feeling a little bit less like dying. 

She sets aside the soup bowl, and disappears. He expects her not to return -- but she does, with a blanket and a few cushions that look like they’ve been pulled off of a couch. Both a good and a bad thing: if she’s padding the tub, it means he’ll be here for a while, which is bad. But it also means the tub is padded. Overall, a tradeoff he can live with.

He relaxes a little, with his head tilted back on a pillow. He’s started shivering, chills. 

“Tell me,” he says. “What am I in for?” 

He has plenty of predictions himself, from the very mundane to the spectrally terrifying. He knows what these men are capable of. One of the reasons he’d decided to go ahead and risk borrowing. 

She perches on the closed toilet lid. “I’m just here to get you cleaned up.” 

“But you have your suspicions.” 

She looks away. Braces her chin on the back of her curled fingers, her elbow on her knee. “You really want to talk?” 

“Shouldn’t I?” he asks. “Humans converse. We evolved, at heart, to be social creatures.” 

A shake of her head. “You’re not like the others.”

“Not quivering in terror?”

“Not begging for your life.” 

The words are matter-of-fact, and they chill him. He keeps his eyes on her, gritting his teeth as his body shudders, of its own accord. His bowels shift, uncomfortably. “I am afraid,” he tells her. “Don’t mistake that. But it makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it? I suppose you’ve grown to know what to do with the begging, desperate ones.” 

A pause. “Why heroin?” she asks. 

“I’ll tell you my story if you’ll tell me yours,” he offers. He doesn’t mean it. “Only you first.” 

Her eyebrows rise.

He lifts his wrists. “I’m a captive audience. You can walk away at any time. It’s only fair.” 

“You’re talking about _fair_?” 

“We might as well lay down a few rules.” 

She shakes her head, again. “What’s your name?” she asks, finally. 

Ah, progress. It doesn’t sound like a question she asks with any regularity; probably doesn’t want to be so personally attached to those she deals with for the mafia. “Sherlock,” he says. 

“ _Really_?”

“Really.” He curls his knees up, hoping that getting his body closer to itself, sharing its own warmth, will stop the shivering sooner. It won’t, of course. He’s been through this song and dance before. “Yours?”

A brief pause, and he can see her thoughts, almost: _it won’t do any harm_. “Joan,” she says.

“Then, Joan,” he says, “how did you get mixed up in the affairs of New York’s seedy criminal underbelly?” 

She bites her lip. “I don’t have the key,” she says. “No matter how persuasive you are, I won’t be able to unlock it.” 

He suspects, distantly, that she may be lying. But he can’t be sure. So _that_ option is right out. Still, there are plenty of alternatives. He could pick the lock himself, given the proper tools -- none of which can be found in a bathtub. “What if there’s a fire?” he asks.

“I don’t think Little Georgie would mind you asphyxiated.”

Georgie is her contact, then. One of those brutal men who believes he’s a cultured aristocrat, sipping bad, expensive wine and dressing in suits that cost several thousand dollars and hang off of him like a burlap sack. She’s probably afraid of him. 

“I should think he would mind the questions that would arise. The official attention.” 

“That’s not really my concern.” 

“No, you’re just here to put me back together so they can remove fingers, toes, limbs at their purview.” 

Joan leans back, crosses her arms. “You want the story or not?”

“Sorry,” he says. “Go ahead.” 

“Thanks,” she drawls. “And it’s not much of a story.”

“Tell me anyhow.”

Her mouth twists. “I lost my license,” she says, “and they were there when w-- when I needed them.” 

His head is tilted; he’s listening, or at least he’s trying to. To the things that she’s saying, and the things that she isn’t. “Who’s ‘we’?” he asks.

“I didn’t say we.”

“You nearly did.” 

A hissed sigh. “My ex.”

“Debtor?”

“Addict.” _Like you_ , she doesn’t say.

“Ah. His debt, I assume?” 

“Once you get in with these people, it’s hard to get out.” 

He lets out a long breath. “That is most certainly the truth.” 

“This is my last one,” she shares, unexpectedly. “They told me that I’m clear after this.”

“Do you believe them?” 

A long pause, and then she moves to her feet. “I’m going to make a few calls,” she says. Translation: she’s going to tell Georgie he’s awake and lucid. 

The nice padded bathtub couldn’t last forever.

~*~

When she returns, the sun has set, and he’s already four times had to maneuver his way out of the tub and to the toilet. He has to make some complicated maneuvers in order to wipe himself, so he tries to do it as little as possible, but withdrawal often doesn’t leave a choice.

He’s just settled back in this time when she comes back. She has a stuffed manila folder in her hands. She drops it in his lap. 

“Georgie says figure out who the killer is,” she says. 

“Oh.” 

Her hands are on his wrists, and she undoes one cuff, hooks it onto the bar before he has a chance to -- well, fight, or something. It gives him rather more mobility, which is much appreciated. Enough that he can use his left hand to flip through the file. 

“You lied,” he says. “I thought so.” 

She doesn’t comment. Settles onto the toilet lid again.

A few bloody photos, a police file. He frowns, and starts paging through. 

“You a private detective?” she asks.

“Of a sort,” he says.

She brings him a thermos of soup this time, and he drinks, idly, as he puzzles through the evidence.

About halfway through, he leaps up, scattering photos, and hurls the contents of his guts into the toilet. He collapses there for a good five minutes until she checks on him, glances in. In a second, she’s close, checking his pulse, touching his forehead. 

“Come on,” she says, “back in.” 

She helps him back into the tub, lies him down, takes away the file and pulls up the blanket and sets a wet cloth on his forehead.

“My mind is quite fine,” he tells her. “I’m lucid.” 

“Don’t make me knock you out again.” 

Obscurely comforting, this. He’s never had a captor so concerned with his welfare. 

~*~

He doesn’t sleep. Lurid images chase themselves around the inside of his eyelids. Hardly an hour or two of trying, and she returns, sits on the tile floor across from the tub. 

“You should stay away,” he surprises himself by saying.

“Why?” she asks.

He waits too long to respond, stretches the silence past plausibility. “Associating with me isn’t good for anyone.” 

“And associating with me is a real picnic.” 

She has a point. 

“Give me the file again.” 

He doesn’t think she will. That restricting his access might be an obscure sort of rebellion against the men who put her in this situation. 

Instead, after a long silence -- he counts to a hundred twenty, slowly -- she stands, takes the file, and sets it gently in his lap. 

She doesn’t say anything more, just slips away.

~*~

Comes in twice more during the night, once when he retches onto the floor, not quite quick enough to get to the toilet. -- She cleans that up, quickly and efficiently, clearing away the stink with a puff of Febreeze. Once, too, when he wakes from a nightmare he can’t remember, sweating and terribly cold. 

She tucks in an extra blanket. Yawns, and that’s when he notices that she’s bleary. She woke up. She was listening close enough that she woke up. 

Had he shouted? 

The scrape of a stool moved into the bathroom. She sets it by the tub, and he feels her fingers stroking through his hair. Should be disturbing, should be off-putting, but it actually sends him to sleep.

~*~

By the morning, he’s figured out the killer, and the wheels in his mind are turning. There must be some way to turn this to his advantage.

Joan gives him some foulsmelling tea, which he gulps, burning his tongue. 

She sits on the stool, again.

“Call up Georgie,” he says. 

“What’s your plan?” she asks.

And he looks up at her. Really looks up. Frowns, his eyebrows furrowing. “What plan?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not stupid.” 

Perhaps he said something while he was dreaming last night. Perhaps he ranted and raved. It’s been known to happen. 

“Why do you care?” he asks. “It isn’t as though it concerns you.” 

“You’re right,” she says. “I’m leaving after you’re out of the woods.” 

“What’s your angle, then?” 

He sees it in her eyes, when she looks away. She’s the protective sort. 

“If you want to help,” he says, “tell them it was Frank Dionosio. Then call the police and tell them there’s a disturbance in, say, the building next door. And then give me that fictitious key of yours.” 

She kneels by the tub, closer. “You’re _sure_ ,” she says. “You have to be sure.” 

“I’d risk my own life on it,” he says. 

“Sometimes that doesn’t mean much to an addict.” 

“I’d risk yours.”

“That means even less.” 

He winces. And he does something he never does: he promises. “We can both get out of this,” he says. “Really. _Really_ out, and have our own lives.” 

She isn’t convinced.

“Please,” he says. “Trust me.” Holds out a hand for the key, and prays to all of those gods that don’t exist that she will just --

The key slaps into his palm. And she digs for her phone. 

They’re on. 

~*~

Afterward, he loses her in the maze of police lights and bystanders. She vanishes. Good for her. He gets taken into custody. Wakes up in the hospital to the sight of his father’s assistant. 

Well.

~*~

One private rehab program later, he steps out onto the streets.

And he goes to look up unlicensed Asian surgeons named Joan. 

~*~

He shows up at her door, unshaven but healthy enough. Knocks, and waits, and when she opens it, he gives her a practiced grin. “Hello again.” 

Brushes past her like he owns the place, and then it’s the most awkward cup of tea he’s ever experienced. He can’t pretend it was much more than two dangerously screwed-up lives passing in the night, as far as bathtubs and handcuffs go. He also can’t pretend he doesn’t want it to be more. 

“You saved my life,” he tells her, after a long silence. His fingers skim around the rim of the tea mug, over and over. 

“I doubt it,” she says. 

“No, really. I’m in your debt.”

This, he notices, she doesn’t object to. Just raises her eyebrows and takes a sip.

“So, you’re a counselor,” he remarks. “Do you happen to be on a job at the moment?” 

She shoots him a look. “Don’t you know?”

“I was being polite.” 

“You were being manipulative.” 

He gives her his best earnest face, and she stifles a laugh behind her hand. 

“I’m an addict, you’re a counselor,” he says. “It’s a match made in -- well, Heaven is probably exaggerating a bit.” 

She sobers. “You’re not worried it’ll come to the attention of the wrong people?” 

The mob’s not over, after all. The two of them may have avoided immediate consequences for their actions, but there are eyes out in the world. They’re being watched. 

“I rather think they’d like us in one place,” he says. “All the better to keep an eye on us.” 

“Can you afford me?” 

“Yes.” 

“Quick response.” She’s surprised.

“Doesn’t take much thought,” he says. “And besides, I already looked up your going rate. My current source of funding approves wholeheartedly.” 

Her mouth twists. “Why?” she asks. “Why would you want anything to do with me?” 

“I have good instincts,” he says. “What do you say, Watson?” Watson, not Joan. Distancing them from what they’ve experienced together. 

“I’ll draw up the contract,” she says. “Mr. ...?” 

“Holmes,” he tells her. “Sherlock Holmes.”


End file.
